Friday April 15, 2016

Boy, this is a tough one. On one hand, this is a totally made up language, so you'd think the inventor has copyright. On the other hand, this is a totally made up language, so it can't be copyrighted. Who knew there would ever come a day when this was a real issue?

The studio says that the filmmakers’ use of the Klingon language in their movie, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from supporters, is "simply further evidence of their infringement of Plaintiffs’ characters, since speaking this fictitious language is an aspect of their characters." So who is in the right on this one? As we noted above, the U.S. Copyright Office hasn’t specifically addressed the issue, and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of case law with regard to the exact topic of copyrighting a fictional language.